Traliving began in a dream. It may sound cliché but it’s what happened. Traviling founder Andrew Gold had been trying to think of a name for his travel website for a few days. But he had his ‘eureka’ moment at 5am as he awoke with the name rumbling in his brain. He wrote it down and went back to sleep. He later told the name to his housemate, who laughed and told him it was a really stupid name. And he may have been right! That is the story of Traliving’s name.
The idea for the website itself came a little earlier. Andrew was doing a night shift at The Sun newspaper where he worked for 1-2 years as a journalist. As the clock struck midnight, he celebrated his 24th birthday in the most anti-climactic of fashions in the news organisation’s tepid office atmosphere. He was tired of living a dreary existence in his hometown of London. So he Googled ‘best climate in the world’. He found himself staring his future home in the face – Medellin, Colombia.
While conducting research, he found that most websites gave very factual information. But he wanted to get a general feel for the town, a sentiment that’s very hard to capture. And he found a lot of the information was compromised. For example: ‘Go to this restaurant because they paid us a bunch of money to say so.’ There were also many sites following one person around – but Andrew found those websites a little egocentric – even if some are pretty remarkable.
But what about a website where everybody could offer up real life stories about their time in a foreign space? Their own subjective experience and pictures.
Henceforth, Traliving was born!
Interest has steadily grown over the six months of Traliving’s short life. Andrew’s best friend Jack Franks, who he met working at a children’s camp in California, got involved after a month. Jack’s input ensured Traliving would still be going strong today. Together, the pair run Traliving as a hobby. They don’t expect to make any cash – at least not any time soon. For now, their only selfish benefit is being able to use the site as a platform for other projects. They generally allow their writers to benefit in the same way by adding links and plugging their own material – as long as it fits in with the philosophy of the website. (They get a lot of emails from marketing-spam people trying to trick them into publishing a story on car rentals or something absurd!)
They’re looking for real stories from real writers, so look them up!
Check out Traliving’s first video about Medellin, Colombia.